# Rails video encoding

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-video-encoding/156213>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [December 22, 2008, 8:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-video-encoding/156213 "2008-12-22T20:32:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![andy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/aeb1de/32.png) [@andy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andy)\
**Post date:** [December 22, 2008, 8:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-video-encoding/156213/1 "2008-12-22T20:32:20Z")

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I’m trying to get a sense if any specific methods for uploading,  
encoding, storing, and playing back video in a Rails app have become  
more popular or reliable than others.

I’ve found several methods for making this happen but none are  
standing out as the preferred method.

Any ideas?

PLEASE don’t post an advertisement for your app or plugin, unless you  
can show that it’s one of the preferred methods.

Thanks

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**Author:** ![andy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/aeb1de/32.png) [@andy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andy)\
**Post date:** [December 22, 2008, 10:09pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-video-encoding/156213/2 "2008-12-22T22:09:01Z")

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Andy wrote:

> I’m trying to get a sense if any specific methods for uploading,  
> encoding, storing, and playing back video in a Rails app have become  
> more popular or reliable than others.
> 
> I’ve found several methods for making this happen but none are  
> standing out as the preferred method.

I have a feeling you’re not likely going to find a satisfactory answer  
to this question. It’s too subjective. People are going to have a lot of  
different ideas on these issues. Which, is why you are probably finding  
a lot of different solutions being used for this.

It’s not really even possible to answer the first part of your question,  
the part about uploading. There exists several different solutions that  
work well in different situations. There’s attachment\_fu, paperclip, and  
I’m sure several others. Choosing which one is the “preferred method” is  
going to be a matter of opinion. And that’s just the simplest part of  
your question.

Encoding is, of course, going to be difficult to answer. It depends on  
what codecs you want to support, what platform will be doing the  
encoding, what quality vs. compression your trying to attain. There are  
many question and one solution is not going to cover all cases.

The only good news I have for you is the last part. The playback will  
not be handled by Rails anyway. That’s going to depend on what the  
client has set to playback whatever codecs you decide to provide. For  
instance, as a Mac user I prefer the QuickTime player/plugin, which I  
use to playback most online video including QuickTime (mp4, mov),  
Windows Media (wmf), Divx, etc. But, that’s certainly not going to be  
the case for everyone.